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Solid State Drives are now much less expensive, and faster, so we decided to give them another look.

Until recently, we have always recommended simply disabling AHCI for a Windows XP installation. Find out why you may want to reenable it now that eSATA is available!

Solid State Drives (SSD) have been around for a few years in the commercial market, and they are building more and more hype as time goes on. The fabled drives are shock-proof, beautifully light on battery usage, and perform so much faster than your standard Hard Disk Drive (HDD) it might just make your head explode. Or so the marketing goes. To top it all off, the cheapest of these amazing gadgets will only set you back a cool, inexpensive $17/GB, or $544 for a 32 GB drive.

2.5" USB IDE hard drive enclosures purchased for $10 shipped and 3.5" enclosures for less than $20 shipped. If you need more storage for backup or data, consider one of these over an expensive laptop drive upgrade.

Probably that answer is no. Read below for an explanation of RAID and why you may or may not want to use it.

We've written a guide that discusses parallel and serial ATA performance as well as comparing how drive RPMs affect performance. To summarize the article, serial and parallel ATA provide basically identical performance due to the fact that hard drives are much slower than either interface, but the connectors are different and SATA laptop hard drives can be connected to a desktop computer without an adapter. Regarding RPMs, they are the number 1 performance difference-maker for a hard drive. However, as you can see from the included benchmarks, the difference is smaller than you might think. Unless you really do use an application that is hard drive dependant, it is generally better to get as much storage as you need and make speed a secondary concern.